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Dinora Pines, born in 1919, did not encounter psychoanalysis formally until she became a trainee at the British Psychoanalytical Society at the age of 40 in 1959. She had been a gifted university student of languages and literature, but then she turned to medicine-both her parents were doctors—in order to join the war effort. However, on qualifying in 1945, she was then needed to care for the civilian population, which she did as both a dermatologist and as a general practitioner. “When I began clinical practice as a doctor,” she wrote autobiographically, “I gradually learnt to listen very carefully to what my patients were telling me or—even more important—not telling me as I examined their bodies.” She treated both men and women, but her attention was caught most compellingly by female developmental experiences—menarche, pregnancy, giving birth to babies and mothering them, and menopause. She thus came to her fundamental insight: “I saw that many patients somatized rather than spoke.”
Pines brought to her “psychoanalytic journey” all that she had already learned as a reader of texts and all that she had learned as a dermatologist and a general practitioner: “somatization” is a language; it is, as the title of her collection says, A Woman's Unconscious Use of Her Body. The particular body language she specialized in was “skin communication.” “Sensitive